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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny